bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2010) — Fall 2010 // Automne 2010, pp. 26–29
Note de la rédaction : Dans le second article de la série sur Churchill et le Canada, 1900-1954, David Bilks, professeur émérite de relations internationales a la University of Leeds, achève son tableau d’une relation très spéciale. Il documente l’extraordinaire appui du Canada à l’effort de guerre, de concert avec les autres dominiums du Commonwealth. Il trace aussi un portrait de Churchill dans l’après-guerre, bâtissant la capacité d’armes nucléaires de la Grande-Bretagne avec l’aide du Canada, mais fatigué des escarmouches et des guerres qui devaient suivre. Churchill était devenu un partisan de la recherche de solutions pacifiques aux tensions avec l’Union soviétique pour des raisons que les lecteurs d’aujourd’hui sauront comprendre, en particulier ceux et celles qui sont conscients de l’actualité au Moyen-Orient. Le professeur Bilks s’est peut-être inspiré un peu de l’état d’esprit de Churchill lui-même lorsqu’il a conclu la conférence sur laquelle repose cette série par quelques mots chaleureux : « More than Fifty years on, let us in Britain say to the distinguished Canadians in this audience, and through you to a wider audience : Thank you a Thousand times for all that Canada did and does ».
At the beginning of the war, the Dominions had a population of some 30 million. Of them rather more than I million lived in Canada. Upon this slender human base, scattered over the second largest country in the world, an enormous industrial and military effort was raised; and when we read of glorious feats performed by the forces of Australia and New Zealand, we should reflect that the population of Australia was no more than seven million, roughly the same as that of London or New York; and of New Zealand no more than 1.5 million, equal perhaps to Birmingham or Glasgow.
Together, Britain and the overseas Commonwealth put into the field more than I million men and women, of whom a good 2.5 million, all volunteers, came from India. There were almost 3 million from the Dominions and between 5 and 6 million from Britain herself. The governments and peoples of the Commonwealth were the only ones which fought from the beginning of the war to the end. They mourned more than 500,000 killed, including 60,000 who lost their lives in air-raids in this country and 30,000 who perished in their service with the merchant navy. The United States lost a total of 322,000 lives, a fact which I mention not in order to draw sly comparisons but to remind us of something which in these post-war years of overwhelming American predominance we easily forget: until the summer of 1944, Britain and the Commonwealth had more divisions in fighting contact with the enemy than had the United States, and consistently fought more of the war at sea and in the air.
Although we sometimes hear assertions that victory was secured by the might of the Red Army or the irresistible strength of the United States, it was a more complicated business than that. For Commonwealth countries such as Britain and Canada it was also a six-year business. They gave everything they had and without that effort the war could not have been won. That this is one of the lesser-known, though supreme, facts of the twentieth century need not deter us from proclaiming it now and again. If a bat-squeak of British pride is still permissible, let us also recall that by 1940 this country was spending 50% of its national income on the direct needs of the war, thanks to the decisions of the much-maligned Baldwin and Chamberlain governments; a fact which even modern writing about the 1930s scarcely acknowledges, and a figure which — need I say? — had never previously been approached. By 1941, the proportion had risen to 54%, and there it remained more or less constant for the duration. No belligerent in any part of the world outmatched those figures.
Britain’s painfully-rebuilt reserves of foreign currency were mainly exhausted in the first year of the war; precious assets in North America had to be sold, often at lamentably low prices, because the need for dollars was overwhelming. Only lend-lease enabled the war to be carried on at its full pitch of intensity. Nonetheless, Britain’s debts to Canada were accumulating by 1941 at the rate of more than $1,000 million a year. Pearl Harbour transformed the outlook, political and strategic. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the President made a deeply significant telephone call to the Prime Minister of Canada. “There will have to be a Supreme Council,” he said, “and I am determined it shall have its headquarters in Washington.” It was there that over Christmas, 1941, Roosevelt, Churchill and the military staffs agreed that the first object of Allied strategy must be the defeat of Germany, and that the USA and the Commonwealth should combine their resources and wage the war together. A few days later, Churchill delivered a celebrated speech in Ottawa, the first to be broadcast from Parliament — “Some chicken; some neck” — and dined with King at his home, Laurier House. After a struggle of conscience, King had allowed cocktails to be brought in from a neighbouring club. Asked what he would care to drink, Churchill replied — we must imagine out of sheer mischief — “Tomato juice”. Over dinner, his host said “Canada plans to make an immediate gift to you of one billion dollars.” Like most people in those days, Churchill was not accustomed to “billion”, and thought he must have misheard. He had to ask again. “We are going to give you a billion dollars” the Prime Minister of Canada repeated.
Not long afterwards, the debts owed by Britain to Canada for war expenditures of no less than $700 million were converted into an interest-free loan. The handsome gift of which Mr. King had spoken was exhausted in a twelve-month; whereupon the government of Canada bought, at a cost of $200 million, the factories built in Canada at British expense for the manufacture of munitions. Canada undertook to pay directly for no fewer than 35 squadrons of the Royal Canadian Air Force serving in Europe, at $185 million a year. Soon after that, the government of Canada announced that it would provide further supplies to the United Nations — which in practice meant mainly to Britain — to the tune of another I billion dollars. Surely, we may exclaim, this must mark the limit even of Canadian generosity? Not at all; later in the war there followed another donation of $800 million and then, though it is scarcely credible, a further gift of $2,000 million.
Canada had bled herself white for the cause and in the spring of 1946, when our need in this country was desperate, she made yet another loan of dollars on modest terms. The burden for these purposes carried by individual Canadian taxpayers was between three and four times as great as that borne in the USA. Let us also notice that although some accounts of lend-lease suggest that the munitions and money flowed in one direction, we in our turn were generous to others through reverse lend-lease.
We must turn to the subject of atomic weapons. In that field the British possessed a good deal of knowledge and scientific expertise. The United States had not only distinguished scientists but invulnerability to air attack and vast reserves of cash. Canada held some of the indispensable minerals. Here was the North Atlantic Triangle, sometimes thought of as mere theory or aspiration, working well in practice, despite early bickerings and misunderstandings. Here was the war at its most secret; even the codename “Tube Alloys” was struck out of the telegrams circulated to members of the War Cabinet in London. The Deputy Prime Minister himself, Mr. Attlee, knew scarcely anything of the enterprise; whereas Mackenzie King knew everything and in the person of C.D. Howe had a hard-driving and highly-respected minister with a seat on the Board which controlled the project.
At the end of his tour in 1929, Churchill had described British Columbia, somewhat in the style of his exclamation at the station in Montreal, as “a wonderful possession”, as if it were British territory. While it would be foolish to place undue weight on this or that remark, it is broadly true that Churchill in the earlier part of the war accepted without enthusiasm the facts of Dominion independence. The formalities of the position he understood well enough: but the surge of support from the Dominions arose from no neat reading of contractual obligations; Britain’s own contribution was inevitably and properly the largest; in most theatres the Allied forces stood, until the entry of the United States into the war, under British command. It was not until the conclusion of the second Quebec conference, in September 1944, that Britain’s High Commissioner in Ottawa could write privately to London of the great pains which Churchill had taken to keep Mackenzie King and his colleagues informed:
.. his attitude with the Canadians is far better now than it was up to eighteen months ago. He is friendly and generally approachable, gives them lots of confidential information, and is more or less ready to discuss patiently and reasonably any question which they wish to raise. This makes them feel that he regards them as real comrades. They used to admire him enormously, but from a distance and with a certain sense that they were naughty children whom the headmaster saw occasionally with no particular pleasure. They now admire him at least as much as they ever did, not only as a great but forbidding leader, but also as a friend and good companion. Relations between him and them are really excellent. Of course, it doesn’t do any harm with them when he indicates clearly, as he did at his meeting with them the other day, that he thinks they have done a really magnificent job and hopes that they will be returned to power again at the next Election!
At the end of the meeting he made a very sincere and moving speech to Mr. Mackenzie King and his colleagues about Canada’s war effort and the position of greatly enhanced importance which this has given the Dominion in world affairs. Mackenzie King replied with some equally sincere and moving words about Canada’s admiration and affection for Winston. It was a good show.
Let us now stray forward into peacetime. Churchill returned to 10 Downing Street, a month short of his 77th birthday, in the autumn of 1951. He discovered that the Labour government under Attlee had built, but had not had time to test, an atomic bomb; developments which had been assiduously concealed not only from Parliament but from most members of the Cabinet. The large sums required had been ingeniously smuggled through by presenting false estimates year after year. As Churchill remarked afterwards to President Eisenhower, Britain was becoming an atomic power “thanks to Attlee’s somewhat unconstitutional exertions”.
Because the United States had broken off collaboration with Britain in these matters, both as to information and materials, shortly after the war, the British bomb had been built through a heavy duplication of effort, not to mention expense. Churchill’s first thought on regaining office was to set off for Washington and Ottawa. Here was a scene far less favourable than everyone had hoped in 1945; rather, here was a world on the brink of another catastrophe, a fact which he confronted squarely in his speech at the Chateau Laurier. The Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, Jock Colville, seeing his master’s exhaustion, prepared a draft. Churchill, lying in bed at the Governor-General’s residence, read it through: “This is very good”; and then, after a pause, “too good”. Another silence fell. “I may feel bound to use it…” Then he suddenly threw aside the bedclothes, summoned a “young lady” of respectable age and dictated a script of his own, saying that he could not bring himself to play a deceitful trick upon the Canadians by reading out the words of someone else.
The interpreter of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal, whose task was to render Churchill’s oration into French for the population of Quebec, was thus obliged to tackle his task without a text. We may spare a thought for him. What to say when the Prime Minister lamented “Peace does not sit untroubled in her vineyard’’? Little wonder that a silence ensued in the translation or that “La paix n’est pas encore assurée” has the sense without the magic. Here is a part of what was heard by the largest audience which had ever listened to a broadcast in North America:
Tonight in our gathering we make a valiant and, I believe, unconquerable assertion of the spirit of our combined identity and survival. We have surmounted all the perils and endured all the agonies of the past. We shall provide against and thus prevail over the dangers and problems of the future, withhold no sacrifice, grudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe. All will be well. We have, I believe, within us the life-strength and guiding light by which the tormented world around us may find its harbour of safety, after a storm-beaten voyage.
This year will mark the 85th anniversary of Canada’s confederation. A magnificent future awaits Canada if only we can all get through the present hideous world muddle. When I first came here after the Boer War, these mighty lands had but 5 million inhabitants. Now there are 14 million. When my grandchildren come here, there may well be 30 million. Upon the whole surface of the globe there is no more spacious and splendid domain open to the activity and genius of free men, with one hand clasping in enduring friendship the United States, and the other spread across the ocean both to Britain and to France. You have a sacred mission to discharge. That you will be worthy of it I do not doubt. God bless you all.
The sharp of hearing may catch the low tone of Mr. St. Laurent, Prime Minister of Canada, saying in his clipped style “Very good” and Churchill’s modest rejoinder “I did my best to keep it going.”
In that epoch collaboration between Britain and Canada in many contexts — the Commonwealth, the Colombo Plan, NATO — counted for a great deal. The British economy began to revive; the atomic bomb was successfully tested; Stalin died, unlamented outside the admittedly numerous ranks of the gullible; the French forces lost ground in Indo-China; the British still played a substantial, and sometimes independent, role in the world. Churchill longed above all to test the ground with the new regime in Russia. After suffering a severe stroke in the summer of 1953, he fought his way back to passable health, but lived on a lowered level of vitality. When he paid his last visit to Washington as Prime Minister in the summer of 1954, a few weeks short of his 80th birthday, he did his best to minimise the sharp differences of view which had emerged over Indo-China and urged upon President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles the need for talks with the Russians.
This latter purpose at least could be openly avowed during the brief visit to Ottawa which followed. To seek some agreement with Russia was not necessarily what we should expect from him. Nevertheless, it was the project to which he devoted the last two years of his political life. He was desperate to get on terms if some tolerable truce could be reached; or at the very least to show that everything possible had been done before the prospect of another war, more devastating than the last, had to be faced. In other words, his reasoning was very like that of Chamberlain in 1938. When he presented the argument at Bermuda in December, 1953, Eisenhower had declared that Russia was a harlot, whatever dress she might wear; America intended to drive this whore off her beat into the back streets. Six months later, the President’s line proved less absolute. Because the recording of Churchill’s lengthy press conference in Ottawa has survived, we can listen to his unrehearsed explanation of what he called his policy of double-dealing:
People say to me, aren’t you asking to have it both ways? If you are trying to build up fighting strength and organisation, unity of the great vast confederacy of which we are a part, isn’t it impossible to hold out a friendly hand to Russia? Isn*t it trying to have it both ways? Well, Iam trying to have it both ways. I think when two things hang together, as they do, there is no harm in trying to have things both ways. In fact, you won’t get them any other way than having them together. Peace through strength means that you will keep a friendly alternative before the eyes of your principal opponents…the Russians might very likely be content to have a good time instead of another phase of torture and slaughter… They haven’t had much of a good time, the people of Russia, with whom I have no quarrel — never had, always great sympathy — but I assure you if the capitalist democracies had to go through the sort of life they have to lead, there would be lots to talk about at the general elections which would occur.
That is delightfully put. We discern that Churchill conceived not only of a North Atlantic triangle but of a quadrilateral, because of France. It was doubly appropriate to say so in the presence of a Prime Minister of French Canadian descent. When Churchill talked of a “confederacy” being built up, he meant not only NATO but the Commonwealth countries. All that was public property; but there was one piece of deeply concealed business, for without the assistance of Canada Britain could not manufacture the hydrogen bomb. It would be comic to record, were it not sad, that the Prime Minister of Great Britain learned of the American possession and testing of the hydrogen bomb from a report in The Manchester Guardian in February, 1954. He immediately rang up in turn the Secretary of the Cabinet, the Foreign Secretary and each of the three Chiefs of Staff, none of whom had any knowledge of this momentous event. “Tt’s lucky that at least one person in Whitehall reads the newspapers” Churchill observed.
An immense project, rendering all previous weapons of mass destruction obsolescent, or as Churchill expressed it placing us as far from the atomic bomb as we used to be from the bow and arrow, had been matured without consulting the United States’ closest ally. Shortly before Churchill arrived in Canada, he and a few fellow-ministers had decided that Britain must make the hydrogen bomb. Since the government of the USA would share neither the expertise nor the materials, much turned upon Canadian goodwill; for the process required tritium, which Canada could supply and Britain could not. On June 29, 1954, Churchill dined with the Prime Minister and C.D. Howe, now Minister of Defence Production. Colville, who was present, recorded in his diary “A most secret subject discussed with apparent success”; so secret that when he came to edit this document 30 years afterwards, Sir John Colville imagined the subject to be the American threat to use atomic weapons in Korea. In reality, the deadly question was whether Canada would supply Britain with the tritium? The Canadian Cabinet agreed to the transaction on the next day.
The Canada with which Churchill had made acquaintance more than half a century before, with a tiny population, much of it poverty-stricken, unsure of its capacity to sustain an independent existence alongside the giant to the south, had become a country playing a leading part in international affairs, a major trading and industrial power, the help of which was now indispensable to the manufacture of weapons so destructive that, as Churchill hoped, nations would at last judge war between them to entail ruin on such a scale as to be self-defeating.
With deep reluctance and far behind schedule, Churchill drove to the airport outside Ottawa. A large crowd sang “For he’s a jolly good fellow” under the guidance of that devoted friend of this country, Brooke Claxton, about to retire as Minister of Defence. Lord Moran recorded that the Canadians regarded Churchill as belonging to them and had a feeling that they might never see him again, that he had descended out of history to say “Goodbye”. A politician cast in conventional mould might have remarked at Rockcliffe that night, “We have exchanged views frankly with the government of Canada and are grateful for the understanding attitude which we invariably find here”, or something to that effect. Openly emotional, a showman and an artist through and through, striving for effect, Churchill printed his distinctive stamp upon the last words which he spoke in Canada:
It has been a short but wonderful visit and I can’t begin to tell you how much I have enjoyed it. As an aged Privy Councillor I have been honoured to sit with your Cabinet and [he added with a touch of mock solemnity] can report they take their responsibilities most seriously. I am very proud to be in the rare position of a Canadian Privy Councillor, enjoying Cabinet confidences. Canada is playing a great part in today’s world under your remarkable and distinguished Prime Minister. Canada stands high in influence and authority in the councils of the nations.
I know you will continue playing your part in keeping
bright the shield of freedom and justice.
David Dilks is former Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, Professor of International History, and member of the Canada-UK Cultural Relations Committee.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2010) — Fall 2010 // Automne 2010, pp. 26–29. Read the rest of this issue →
